Saturday, January 30, 2016

10 Commandments of Commons Economics

This is a synthesis of ten years of research by the P2P
Foundation on the emerging practices of new productive communities and
the ethical entrepreneurial coalitions that create livelihoods for
shared resources. It was written for the Uncommons conference in Berlin
last October by P2P founder Michel Bauwens.

As we have tried to show
elsewhere, the emergence of commons-oriented peer production has
generated the emergence of a new logic of collaboration between open
productive communities who created shared resources (commons) through
contributions, and those market-oriented entities that created added
value on top or along these shared commons.
This article addresses the emerging practices that should inspire
these entities of the ‘ethical’ economy. The main aim it to create new
forms that go beyond the traditional corporate form and its extractive
profit-maximizing practices of value extraction. Instead of extractive
forms of capital, we need generative forms, that co-create value with
and for the commoners.
I am using the form of commandments to explain the new practices. All
of them have already emerged in various forms, but need to be
generalized and integrated.
What the world and humanity, and all those beings that are affected
by our activities require is a mode of production, and relations of
production, that are “free, fair and sustainable" at the same time.I. OPEN AND FREE1. Thou shalt practice open business models based on shared knowledge
Closed business models are based on artificial scarcity. Though
knowledge is a non- or anti-rival good that gains in use value the more
it is shared, and though it can be shared easily and at very low
marginal cost when it is in digital form, many extractive firms still
use artificial scarcity to extract rents from the creation or use of
digitized knowledge. Through legal repression or technological sabotage,
naturally shareable goods are made artificially scarce, so that extra
profits can be generated. This is particularly galling in the context of
life-saving or planet-regenerating technological knowledge. The first
commandment is therefore the ethical commandment of sharing what can be
shared, and of only creating market value from resources that are scarce
and create added value on top or along these commons. Open business
models are market strategies that are based on the recognition of
natural abundance and the refusal to generate income and profits by
making them artificially scarce.Thou shalt find more information on this here

II. FAIR2. Thou shalt practice open co-operativism
Many new more ethical and generative forms are being created, that
have a higher level of harmony with the contributory commons. The key
here is to choose post-corporate forms that are able to generate
livelihoods for the contributing commoners.
Open cooperatives in particular would be cooperatives that share the following characteristics:
1) they are mission-oriented and have a social goal that is related to the creation of shared resources
2) they are multi-stakeholder governed, and include all those that are affected by or contributing to the particular activity
3) they constitutionally, in their own rules, commit to co-create commons with the productive communities
I often add the fourth condition that they should be global in
organisational scope in order to create counter-power to extractive
multinational corporations.
Cooperatives are one of the potential forms that commons-friendly
market entitities could take. We see the emergence of more open forms
such as neo-tribes (think of the workings of the Ouishare community), or
more tightly organized neo-builds, such as Enspiral.org, Las Indias or
the Ethos Foundation. Yet more open is the network form chose by the
Sensorica open scientific hardware community, which wants to more
tightly couple contributions with generated income, by allowing all
microtasked contributions in the reward system, through open value or
contributory accounting (more below).Thou shalt find more information on this here.

3. Thou shalt practice open value or contributory accounting
Peer production is based on distributed tasks, freely contributed by
an open community-driven collaborative infrastructure. The tradition of
salaries based on fixed job description may not be the most appropriate
way to reward those that contribute to such processes. Hence, the
emergence of open value accounting or contributory accounting. As
practiced already by Sensorica, this means that any contributor may add
contributions, log them according to project number, and after peer
evaluation is assigned ‘karma points’. When income is generated, it
flows into these weighted contributions, so that every contributor is
fairly rewarded. Contributory accounting, or other similar solutions,
are important to avoid that only a few contributors closely related to
the market capture the value that has been co-created by a much larger
community. Open book accounting ensure that the (re)distribution of
value is transparent for all contributors.Thou shalt find more information on this here.

4. Thou shalt insure fair distribution and benefit-sharing through Copyfair licensing
The copyleft licenses allow anyone to re-use the necessary knowledge
commons on the condition that changes and improvements are added to that
same commons. This is a great advance, but should not be abstracted
from the need for fairness. When moving to physical production which
involves finding resources for buildings, raw materials and payments to
contributors, the unfettered commercial exploitation of such commons
favours extractive models. Thus the need to maintain the knowledge
sharing, but to ask reciprocity for the commercial exploitation of the
commons, so that there is a level playing field for the ethical economic
entities that do internalize social and environmental costs. This is
achieved through copyfair licenses, which allow full sharing of the
knowledge but ask for reciprocity in exchange for the right of
commercialization.Thou shalt find more information on this here.

5. Thou shalt practice solidarity and mitigate the risks of work and life through Commonfare practices
One of the strong results of financial and neoliberal globalization
is that the power of nation-states has gradually weakened, and there is
now a strong and integrated effort to unwind the solidarity mechanisms
that were embedded in the welfare state models. As long as we do not
have the power to reverse this slide, it is imperative that we
reconstruct solidarity mechanisms of distributed scope, a practice which
we could call ‘commonfare’. Examples such as the Broodfonds
(Netherlands), Friendsurance (Germany) and the health sharing ministries
(U.S.), or cooperative entities such Coopaname in France, show us the
new forms of distributed solidarity that can be developed to deal with
the risks of life and work.Thou shalt find more information on this here.

III. SUSTAINABLE6. Thou shalt use open and sustainable designs for an open source circular economy
Open productive communities insure maximum participation through
modularity and granularity. Because they operate in a context of shared
and abundant resources, the practice of planned obsolescence, which is a
feature of profit-maximizing corporations, is alien to them. Ethical
entrepreneurial entities will therefore use these open and sustainable
designs and produce sustainable good and services.Thou shalt find more information on this here. http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design

7. Thou shalt move beyond an exclusive reliance on
imperfect market price signals towards mutual coordination of production
through open supply chains and open book accounting
What decision-making is for planning, and pricing is for the market, mutual coordination is for the commons!
We will never achieve a sustainable ‘circular economy’--in which the
output of one production process is used as an input for another-- with
closed value chains in which every cooperation has to be painfully
negotiated under conditions of little transparency. But entrepreneurial
coalitions that are already co-dependent on a collaborative commons can
create eco-systems of collaboration through open supply chains, in which
the production process becomes transparent, and through which every
participant can adapt his behaviour based on the knowledge available in
the network. There is no need for over-production when the production
realities of the network become common knowledge.Thou shalt find more information on this here.

8. Thou shalt practice cosmo-localization
“What is light is global, and what is heavy is local”: this is the
new principle animating commons-based peer production in which knowledge
is globally shared, but production can take place on demand and based
on real needs through a network of distributed coworking and
microfactories. Certain studies have shown that up to two-thirds of
matter and energy goes not to production, but to transport, which is
clearly unsustainable. A return to re-localized production is a sine qua
non for the transition towards sustainable production.Thou shalt find more information on this here.

9. Thou shalt mutualize physical infrastructures
Platform cooperatives, data cooperatives and fairshare forms of
distributed ownership can be used to co-own our infrastructures of
production.
The misnamed sharing economy from AirBnB and Uber shows the potential
of matching idle resources. Co-working, skillsharing, ridesharing are
examples of the many ways in which we can re-use and share resources to
dramatically augment the thermo-dynamic efficiencies of our consumption.
In the right context of co-ownership and co-governance, a real
sharing economy can achieve dramatic advances in reduced resource use.
Our means of production --inclusive machines -- can be mutualized and
self-owned by all those that create value.Thou shalt find more information on this here.

10. Thou shalt mutualize generative capital
Generative forms of capital cannot rely on an extractive money supply
that is based on compound interest that is due to extractive banks. We
have to abolish the 38% financial tax that is owed on all goods and
services and transform our monetary system, and substantively augment
the use of mutual credit systems.Thou shalt find more information on this here.